December 1st, 2006
Overheard on the bus onto campus two days ago:
Student A: Yeah, I might go for my Ph.D., but I don’t know. I’ll have to write a dissertation….
Student B: What’s a dissertation?
Student A: Like a 300 page paper.
Student B: (shocked awed silence) Oh my god. How can anyone write that much?
I had to control my laughter at this. After all, can’t be mocking the customers. But a dissertation is hardly a 300 page paper, although at this point I’m not sure which would be harder. I was also a bit surprised that Student B didn’t know what a dissertation is, or at least hadn’t heard of dissertations. But people can be remarkably ignorant: I remember learning in college that an acquaintance didn’t know who Mao Zedong was, and I only learned about the existence of Oxfam a couple of years ago.
Or maybe this is the Cambridge effect, where everyone is writing a dissertation. It’d be like asking what a producer was in Hollywood.
December 1st, 2006
About a month ago I was volunteering in Watsonville at a legal aid agency while I was looking for a job. Watsonville is the kind of town that makes you feel like you are out of the country. Old Latino men with big cowboy hates sauntered down the main street, the street smelled like mexican food and of course everyone spoke spanish. It is a wonderful place to be. In need of a break, and tired, I decided to get some coffee. The only coffee shop in the area was of course a starbucks….but I went in anyway. I decided it was like a carbon credit situation, my volunteering at the legal aid canceled out my purchasing coffee from a major chain store that probably put all the other local coffee shops out of business. With cup in hand, I walked back to my little agency and a woman came up to me, gave me a mean look and said, “I’ve been known to hit people with a starbucks cup.” Not liking the idea of getting hit, I quickly walked away…still holding the cup. I had that feeling you get when you’re caught by your parents coming home late….and unfortunately, that was a feeling I was quite familiar with as a teenager. Needless to say, the coffee did not taste too good after that. Now my guilt has increased since I heard on NPR today that Starbucks is fighting Ethiopia’s attempts to trademark their coffee to help the farmers who grow it make (more) fair wages…probably still not good wages in their economy. Starbucks is fighting fair trade wages in a country that needs any help it can get.
The bottom line - I should really stop drinking coffee. However, what does that leave me with…tea? I’m sure there is a lot of fair trade tea out there (ha ha). Then there’s the bottled water industry (nope), the milk industry (nope), orange juice (migrant workers…nope).
No more liquids is clearly the only solution.
- N.
October 22nd, 2006
Ok, no one has commented to me regarding this, so I guess it didn’t make it above the fold at major news outlets. I’ll just briefly mention it. Last Wednesday and Thursday, the UC Regents (the 26-person governors of the UC system) came to town to view the campus. This happens rarely; I’m not sure how rarely (my newspaper sources below conflict wildly on this), but a staff member told me that the when they visited the campus was during the Regan era they were not even able to get on campus. So, they no doubt viewed a return to radical UCSC with some trepidation. More
October 8th, 2006
Amartya Sen visited the UCSC campus yesterday to deliver the 6th annual Maitra lecture (a lecture series plus Satyajit Ray film screening endowed by Anuradha Maitra, widow of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sidhartha Maitra). His talk was formally a bit off: a response to some critical reviews of his book (or maybe, just some criticisms found in some reviews), Identity and Violence, which few people in the audience probably read. I have not, though I did read this Slate precis when the book came out. The substance of the article/book seems to be this: the Huntington “clash of civilizations” model, which predicted inevitable conflict and drift based on narrow categories (religion, “culture”) misanalyzes people as unidimensional More
